Monday, 26 December 2011

Last week
there was a blooming Early Modern activity in the Blogosphere, and much less
posts in the Digital Humanities sphere. Within Early Modern Studies I read
interesting posts about Christmas habits, a meeting of the oldest Shakespeare
society, Shakespeare’s sources and also about takes on Early Modern theatre
history (Richard Burbage, and plays published and decorated with marginalia).
Furthermore there was a post featuring Kepler and a supernova in 1604, and another one an Early Modern pickpocket. Within
the Digital Humanities set there is only one post, that of Mathew Kirschenbaum
about his new project and a request. So happy reading again, and also Merry
Christmas (time)!

Early Modern Studies:

Sylvia Morris’s post, “Elizabethan Christmas: carols” presents Tudor carol singing
issues: notes, customs, lyrics, atmosphere, pictures, and through clicking
collections of songs. This is a great Christmas post! Here is a stanza from one
of the lyrics for all to enjoy:

At Christmas in
Christ we rejoice and be glad,

As only of whom our
comfort is had:

At Christmas we joy
altogether with mirth

For his sake that
joyed us all with his birth.

Melissa Leon in her “What
makes a good Shakespearian?” reports on the 866th
meeting of The Shakespeare Club, Stratford-upon-Avon
(founded in 1823). The report includes an audio recorded, 45-minute interview
with Stanley Wells about his career. It is worth reading the post and also
listening to the talk with Stanley Wells.

Liz Dollimore continuing her series about Shakespeare’s sources relates 2 Henry IV with Machiavelli in her “Shakespeare’s Sources – Henry IV part ii.” The Prince is rather a source
for ideas than verbatim quotation, but still the link between the two works is
conclusive. The idea that connects the two works is the evergreen political
issue of foreign military campaigns.

Holger Syme announces his outstanding project in his “Well-Read Plays I.” Let me quote him to summarize
the project on annotations. “Among other things, I’m looking at the kinds of
annotations early modern readers left in plays. And in order to build a truly
representative account, I’m trying to produce a comprehensive database of such
annotations in as many books in as many libraries as possible.” Good luck for
this important project!

Holger Syme did not only announce the project of presenting “a few
examples of printed plays that have been annotated in a way that suggests the
reader had performance of one kind or another in mind,” but also started the
series. This time in his “Well-Read Plays II” he writes about a copy of the anonymous No-body, and Some-body (1606), of Two
Merry Milkmaids (by “J. C.;” 1620), a copy of Ben Jonson’s Every
Man Out of His Humour with 18th-century
marginalia, a copy of Thomas Dekker’s 1602 Blurt Master-Constable and
of Thomas Middleton’s The Puritan of 1607. This post and the series
are relevant for historians of the theatre and of the book.

In another post, “Shakespearean Mythbusting III: Richard Burbage” Holger
Syme argues that there is no evidence that Shakespeare created Richard III’s
character for Richard Burbage, and adds that it is more likely that Augustine
Philips was Gloucester in Richard III, while Burbage acted Richmond’s role. Conjectural this may be, yet
this presents a real alternative to the well-established faith in Richard
Burbage.

William Eamon’s post on “Kepler and the Star of
Bethlehem” presents
an interesting case relating to science and religion. “On the evening of the 17th of
October 1604, as the clouds finally lifted over the city of Prague to reveal a clear night sky, the
German astronomer Johannes Kepler observed a new star in the feet of the
Constellation of Serpens.” This observation would have been interesting on its
own account but Kepler was not satisfied with this, but claimed that this was
the star that led the Three Kings to Christ’s cradle.

Nick in his
“The Christmas Cutpurse” makes a fascinating case about how everyday
acts found their way into pop-, and not so pop-culture. He presents John
Selman’s, a pickpocket’s case, who was caught when stealing a purse, was
imprisoned and was sentenced to death. He then popped up in Ben Jonson’s Love
Restored “as the character of ‘the Christmas Cutpurse’.” He then
seemingly appeared in other works as well: “he bookseller Thomas Hall registered
the title of The araignment of Iohn Selman(London, 1612), printed by W. Hall,
on the day after the execution. This was a standard pamphlet account of a
crime, trial and execution, including a version of Selman’s gallows speech. The
printer George Eld produced for the bookseller and ballad specialist John
Wright a broadside titled The Captaine Cut-purse, also sold under
an alternate, less catchy title of The arrainement, condemnation, and
excution of the grand [--] Iohn Selman (both London, 1612). Two other
ballads about Selman, which do not survive, were also registered with the
Stationers’ Company.”

Digital Humanities:

Matthew
Kirschenbaum in his “My Literary History of Word Processing: Your Assitance Needed” announces that he is in the middle of “
writing a book entitled Track Changes: A Literary History of Word
Processing.” This book is about “the moment at which large numbers of
literary writers began making the transition from typewriters to word
processors and personal computers (late 1970s, early 1980s).” For this
enterprise he would like to request any piece of information that pertains to
this topic, from anecdotes to anything that others think relevant. I hope he
will be given a hand in this project.

Tuesday, 20 December 2011

Last week
seems to be full of fine, thought-provoking and interesting posts. The nine
posts in “Early Modern Studies” cover a rather wide range of topics. In this set
you may find items from a smartphone application, Shakespeare and Wagner, and
Thomas Sackville, posts related to conversion and converting people, crowed-funding,
cosmetics, and discovery of a love poem, a post on a nonconformist puritan
preacher. The “Digital Humanities” section includes posts on online courses, digitization
and definitions of terms. The item in “Others” announces the opening of a
database of Newton’s
manuscripts. What a week!

Early Modern Studies:

Robyn Greenwood announced in “‘Going
Digital’: A ‘Bytes’ sized Introduction” that they are working on a
smartphone application “that will make use of digital images and augmented
reality activities to guide visitors around Stratford-upon-Avon and offer users
a new way of exploring the Trust’s properties and collections.” The application
will be launched April 2012.

Dave Paxton’s post explores the relationship between Shakespeare and
Wagner in his “Shakespeare and Revolutionary Sex!” His focus is on
Wagner’s adaptation of The Measure for
Measure entitled Das Liebesverbot.
The reception of Wagner’s adaptation is not without questions and doubts, which
is mainly due to the claim of the opera. Paxton quotes Wagner and then comments
“‘my only object was to expose the sin of hypocrisy and the unnaturalness of a
ruthless code of morals.’ And so the Duke is cut from the work, and Isabella
becomes a sexual revolutionary, joyfully leading the ‘Volk’ towards liberation
and self-determination.”

“Kissing
Converts”, a blog post at Conversion
Narratives in Early Modern Europe meditates about rhetorical eroticism and
religion on account of a Benetton advertisement featuring Pope Benedick’s
(Photoshoped) kissing Ahmed el Tayyeb, and Early Modern narratives about
conversion as eroticised texts.

Nick’s “Seventeenth-century
crowd funding” at Mercurius Politicus
presents John Taylor’s case as an example for crowed-funding in Early Modern
England. Taylor’s
business model was that he persuaded subscribers to pay some money for a book
to be written later on. As he puts it “For The
Pennyles Pilgrimage he managed to persuade around 1,650 subscribers to
pledge money should he complete his journey successfully. Supporters do not
seem necessarily to have just paid Taylor the sale price of the book: the
actor-manager Edward Alleyn pledged one pound, well above the odds for a
54-page octavo, although this may have been more generous than most.” There is
an engraving about Taylor
drinking something attached to the post, which is most fascinating topic and
image-wise, check it out for yourself.

@daintyballerina’s post, “How
Gray-Hairs are dyed Black” presents interesting quotations about 17th-century
cosmetics. I think this is relevant as far as contemporary ideals of beauty
surface in these excerpts.

At Early Modern England, the
reader is informed in “Scholar
discovers 16th-century love poem written by an Englishwoman” that Elaine
Treharne found a Latin poem in an 1561 edition of Chaucer’s works, which seems
to have been written by Elizabeth Dacre dedicated to Anthony Hooke, her
possible tutor. What is fascinating about this poem is that this is a love poem
(as far as I know very few women wrote poems at the time, even fewer love poems
and even fewer in Latin—so this is a rare and revealing poem). Also the post
reports on her short but adventurous life which life is telling insofar as the
lives of 16th-century aristocratic women are concerned.

If one is interested in a report on a 16th-Century nonconformist
Puritan preacher’s life and death written by his son, they should read indeed
DrRoy’s post at Early Modern Whale “'O,
Mr Carter, what shall I do?' The worthy life of John Carter 1554-1635”. The
author of the post provides a short introduction to the work, and then presents
quotations illuminating aspects of John Carter’s life from his prayers to
family life, eating habits etc.

Sylvia Morris, in her “Lawyers
inspiring Shakespeare” presents an informative and interesting biography of
one of the leading lawyers of Elizabethan and early Jacobean times, namely that
of Thomas Sackville, who was also the co-author of the famous revenge tragedy, Gorboduc, a play that may have been
somewhere behind Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Melissa
Terras’ blog post, “Multi-Spectral Connections” reports on the
interesting combination of medical multi-spectral imaging and digitization
projects. It is worth keeping this technology in mind.

Melissa
Terras’ “Digitisation
Studio Setup” is fascinating on two accounts. First, because she gathered a
lot of useful advice on how to set up a digitization studio. Second, because
the post itself demonstrates the power of Twitter, as everything that appears
in the post, was gathered through Twitter responses to her request marked with #digstudio.

I came across
the Cambridge Digital Library last
week, so I announce its opening, and more precisely that of the collection of Isaac Newton’s writings
(at the time being his manuscripts from the 1660’s) there. This is a marvellous
collection, and most user friendly.

Monday, 12 December 2011

The posts I
liked the most last week and pertain to Early Modern Studies and Digital
Humanities show a nice variety of genres and themes. Within the “Early Modern”
set there are five fascinating items about the Shakespearean oeuvre: one about fantasies of
virginity, another about his sources, two other posts are related to
data-mining, plus there is a post on Shakespeare forgery. The posts here that
present non-Shakespearean topics feature aspects of cultural phenomena, such as
horse-baiting, parts of James I’s cousin’s, Arabella Stuart’s life, and a further
one about mechanics. The “Digital Humanities” part consists of less posts in
number than the former group, yet they are not less interesting and edifying.
There are two posts related to conferences—HASTAC 2011 and a Startsup Weekend
conference—referring to videos and conclusions about them. Besides the
conferences one may read an article about the dangers digitization projects are
exposed to. Happy reading!

Early Modern Studies:

In Ewan Fernie’s “Shakespearience 3: Helena’s Fantasies (Part Two)” the reader meets All’s Well that Ends Well’s Helena in her
self-multiplying speech. As Fernie puts it “But what is born here? All sorts of
new Helenas, some far removed from ordinary identity, all engendered in the
first Helena’s
simple act of giving herself away.”

Liz Dollimore in her “Shakespeare’s
sources – Richard II” argues that besides Holinshed’s Chronicles, Froissart’s Chronicles
is also relevant especially in the case of the character of John Gaunt. Gaunt
both in Shakespeare and in Froissart emphasizes the traditional concept that
the legitimacy of a ruler originates from God. Shakespeare’s Richard II,
however, differs from the image of the king in the sources insofar as he is presented
as more fallible than in the sources. From these two premises Dollimore convincingly
infers that here Shakespeare may problematize the concept of divine right, i.e.
arguing for the divine right and showing that Richard cannot act well as a
king.

@daintyballerina published two posts at her Shakespeare’s England blog.
There is one about horse baiting “Delightfully
worried to death by dogs,” by a
guest blogger, Simon Leake. The other, “Far
out of frame this Midsummer moone”
presents “fragments form an overview of the life of Arabella Stuart, cousin to
James I, and niece to Mary, queen of Scots. An illegal marriage, followed by an
attempted escape to France in men’s clothing, and finally committal to the
Tower of London where she subsequently starved to death, Arabella Stuart’s life
makes for intriguing reading.”

Although this is an item that should have been referred to earlier, as
the lecture took place in October, yet as I have come across with it now, I
cannot but include this in the present post. So this was a lecture by Folger
Director Michael Witmore entitled “Data-Mining
Shakespeare” and he speaks about
DocuScope and genres in Shakespeare in a convincing and amazing way.

Another
tool to analyse Shakespeare’s works is WordSeer at Berkeley. This tool can
search for words, visualise their presence through the entire oeuvre, present them as they appear in
individual plays, and also map their connotations. Clicking at this link you
can watch a demo
video about the word “beautiful” across Shakespeare’s works. The textual basis for the searches is the database entitled Internet Shakespeare Editions.

Lisa
Spiro’s “Startups
and the Digital Humanities” is about the author’s experience at a previous
Startsup Weekends conference. In this post she describes the format of this
type of conference— competing teams create projects and then convince a panel
of judges that theirs is the best. Spiro argues that DH projects, even though
they do not enter the market, still they “do need to consider how to define
their value, find users and sustain themselves.” At the end of the post she
lists six important ideas that are to be considered for DH projects.

Matthew
Reisz’s article, “Surfdom,”
in Times Higher Education is a
thought-provoking writing about the fashion of digitization. Although his
overall claim is—I’m afraid—wrong, but his criticism of digitization projects
should be considered by anyone thinking about such a project, insofar as target
audience, use, benefits and investment are concerned.

Monday, 5 December 2011

Last week I
came across less Early Modern posts
than earlier, but to compensate this loss, I am going to refer to more
interesting material within the other two categories. Within the Early Modern set Shakespeare is the unrivalled
champion: the first is about two books on his First Folio, while the next two
posts are devoted to his works—one on Cymbeline
and Boccaccio, and another on Helena’s
uncannily ambiguous references to virginity. Within Digital Humanities four posts elucidate aspects of social media (blogging,
realtime-streaming services, publishing), another ponders about the uses and
limitations of Culturomics for historical studies, and three items by the very
inspiring Cathy N. Davidson. The blog posts in the third, “Others” category are
related to learning and research: one refers to free online university courses and
the other to tools that come in handy for managing research findings.

Early Modern Studies:

Sylvia
Morris’s post “Still
harping on First Folios with Eric Rasmussen” is a fascinating and
informative post on Eric Rasmussen’s two books about the copies of
Shakespeare’s First Folios—the first is a catalogue of the copies that have
come down to us and the other relates stories about these copies. The short
review is embellished with references to audio recordings with Rasmussen and to
other blog posts about the two books.

Liz
Dollimore’s “Shakespeare’s
sources – Cymbeline” is again a great post on Shakespeare’s sources. She mentions the two
most obvious sources, Holinshed’s Chronicles,
and Geoffrey Monmouth’s The History of
the Kings of England. What is, however, missing from these and other
possible English sources is the part when Iachomo gets into Imogen’s bedchamber
to prove her husband that he slept with her. Dollimore makes a case for Boccaccio’s
Decameron to be the source for this
particular part.

Ewan Fernie’s
blog post, “Shakespearience 3: Helena’s Fantasies (Part 1)” meditates about Helena’s strange, at times embarrassingly open and at
the same time ambiguous remarks on virginity. The following sentence captures
the perception of Helena’s
remarks: “Tentativeness, coyness and sexual avidity all
come together here, bewilderingly for us and Helena.”

Digital Humanities:

The post by
j. stoever-ackerman “Sounding Out!
Occupies the Internet, or Why I Blog” is about academic blogging. She
claims that with this writing she intends to take the reader “behind the scenes
of Sounding Out!, sharing some of the reasons why we decided to start a public
conversation about sound studies on the Internet.”

Last week I
referred to Priego’s post about academic blogging. Now I am happy to point to a
reaction to Priego’s writing. Jason B. Jones at ProfHacker posted his take on the issue: “Blogging,
Extinction, and Sustainability.” The reason why he finds academic blogging
important is really convincing. He claims “I don’t think this is always because
they’re doing other things–sometimes the research just grinds slowly, sometimes
there’s a problem in conceptualizing the project in a publishable form, and so
forth. In the past, all that effort would’ve been invisible to peers.”

Adeline
Koh’s guest post, “What
Is Publishing? A Report from THATCamp Publishing” at ProfHacker summarizes the fruits of the THATCamp Publishing
unconference 2011 October, Baltimore.
The unconference focused on the changing means of academic publishing, and also
shares some exemplary initiatives in this field. She concludes her post with
claiming: “THATCamp Publishing provided a valuable forum for academics,
librarians, and publishers to interact. Together we discussed important
questions about how digital forms of publishing are actively changing the way
we conceive of publishing today. How all three will negotiate the changes to
the industry is yet to be determined.”

George
Veletsianos’s post, Open Access Educational
Technology journals
collects a nice list of OA edtech journals. The real advantage of this post is
that the list can be accessed as a Google document and anyone can contribute to
the list with further titles. I find this a really useful initiative.

David
Berry’s most interesting post, “The Gigantic”
brings Heidegger’s concept of the “gigantic”
and realtime-streaming technologies like Twitter and Facebook together. This is
a must-read.

Joseph
Yanielli in his “Darwin
and the Digital Utopia” showcases the uses and the limitations of Google’s
NgramViewer in historical studies. Yanelli’s attitude to Culturomics is sober
and absolutely convincing.

This video
features a talk with Cathy N. Davidson about topics related to her new book, Now You See It. Both the topics and Davidson
are really inspiring here. Furthermore, Davidson’s blog post is a highlight of
the last week: “Five
Ways The Open Web Can Transform Higher Education” These five ways include Macroscopic learning/research,
code as a constantly improving system, narratives of data, forking, creation of
new tools for research. Although
the second blog post seems to be only a longer abstract of a paper that Cathy
N. Davidson is going to read at the HASTAC conference on "Digital
Scholarly Communication," Dec 1-3, University of Michigan,
it is still worth reading in this form especially by those who can’t go to the
conference—like myself. The post is entitled “Faulty
Scientific Logic and the Institutional Status Quo” and argues that the
change of the cultural and technological context of education should change
education as well.

Others:

A week
before I referred to a free online course launched by Stanford. Now I came
across a rather useful repository of free web educational programmes. The
repository is Open Culture: The best free cultural & educational media on
the web. The post published on 28th November lists all the Stanford
free online courses, and at the bottom of the post there are links to the free
online courses at other universities. The post is entitled “Stanford
Launching 14 Free Online Courses in January/February: Enroll Today”

Monday, 28 November 2011

Last week
the Early Modern set
turned out to be the most productive. This set includes a large number of
Shakespeare-posts featuring sources, sonnets, forging Shakespeare and an anti-Stratfordian
polemic writing. Besides Shakespeare I also liked three other pieces of news:
two databases and a CFP. Though less in number, I’ve found three interesting
posts in Digital Humanities too: two posts about sharing (academic blogging and
code), while the third one calls attention to a free online course at StanfordUniversity.

Early Modern Studies:

1. Liz
Dollimore in her Shakespeare’s Sources series, now “Henry
V” wrote about a scene, the battle of wit between Henry and three
traitors. She argues that besides Holinshed, it is a contemporary letter by “Dr.
William Parry who was executed on the morning of 2nd March 1584 for attempting
to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I” that lies in the background of the scene.

2. Sylvia
Morris last week wrote about Shakespeare’s The
Passionate Pilgrim. What is really fascinating in this post, “The
mysterious Passionate Pilgrim and Shakespeare” is that she presents
two variants of sonnet 138, one from The
Passionate Pilgrim and another from the 1609 Q edition, and claims that the
differences between the two reveal something about the poet at work.

3. Stuart
Ian Burns reviews Shakespeare's Poems (Arden Shakespeare: Third Revised Edition).
Edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones. His conclusion is telling enough
to function as an appetiser for the review and the book as well: “Based more
closely than usual on the 1609 Quarto (the exclamation mark is back in Sonnet
123, “No! Time though shalt not boast that I do change…”), each is presented
with extensive notes on the facing page with a short explanatory note at the
top. These compasses prove invaluable for navigating Shakespeare’s fragmentary
maps of the human heart, another helping hand for those of us who’ve become
lost along the way.”

7. Thanks
to Sharon Howard at Early Modern Resources for The Universal Short Title Catalogue
(USTC), which is a collective database of all books published in Europe between the invention of printing and the end of
the sixteenth century. #emdatabase

8. Last but not least, this is a CFP for a conference and an interesting
initiative: “The 3rd International Conference of the European
Society for Early Modern Philosophy will be devoted to the following
theme: Debates, Polemics and
Controversies in Early Modern Philosophy(January
30th to February 2nd, 2013, Université de Grenoble,
France). The general objective of the conference is to take an overview of the
present historiographical situation regarding the study of controversies and to
contribute to a reappraisal of the study of controversies in the history of
early modern philosophy.”

2. Jeremy
Boggs’s blog post “Participating
in the Bazaar: Sharing Code in the Digital Humanities” should convince
everybody that sharing the source code is the future for Digital Humanities. He
makes his case with arguments from his own experience along with more theoretical
ones, and thus ends the post claiming: “We should share our code so others can
learn from us, and so we can learn from others. More than anything, though, we
should share code because it’s academic work, and I think academic work should
be shared openly, critiqued, and improved.”

3. This is
a pioneering enterprise at StanfordUniversity, i.e. a free
online course about “Natural Language
Processing.” The course is managed and taught by Chris Manning and Dan
Jurafsky, and the class starts January 23rd 2012.

Tuesday, 22 November 2011

Last week
was a fascinating week in the blogosphere indeed, which is not only reflected
in the number of the posts but also in the variety of genres. The "Early Modern" group contains posts demonstrating that the authorship debate rolled on last
week with six posts, from serious to really funny ones. Beyond the debate there
are two more posts about aspects of the Shakespearean oeuvre, plus I found a snippet on William Harrison and a database
on 16th-century Scottish letters. In the “Digital Humanities” set I
have included posts on geo-spatial data, JSTOR, traditional editing and/versus
per-review, furthermore on TEI, theory and practice, and video-presentations on
digital tools in the literature classroom. The "Others" category features two ProfHacker posts.

Early Modern Studies:

1. The
Shakespeare authorship discussion witnesses posts with an immense sense of
humour. An example for this is Shaul Bessi’s post “Anonymous
Venetian” at Blogging Shakespeare. This post should be read from beginning
to the end, as the turn comes at the end!

4. Pat Donelly in her “William
Shakespeare, as Anonymous as Réjean Ducharme?” also argues for Shakespeare being
Shakespeare. She does this from the actor’s perspective, and also is happy to
say that the authorship debate, though superfluous, does good to the less known
Elizabethan authors.

5. Eric
Idle’s “Who Wrote Shakespeare?” in The
New Yorker is just a great piece of writing: both a funny take in the
authorship debate, but at the same time a bitter criticism of the anti-stratfordian
camp.

6. To round off this week’s posts on the authorship question, let me
finish with “Shakespeare tops
list of symbols giving Britons pride” at BBC News UK. This
article nicely winds up the debate as it claims that “Some 75% agreed with the
sentence ’I am proud of William Shakespeare as a symbol of Britain’,” referring
to the interrelatedness of Shakespeare and patriotism.

7. Another
Shakespeare related post, by Liz Dollimore this time, at Blogging Shakespeare
is about King John and its relation to Holinshed’s Chronicles. The post is entitled “Shakespeare’s
Sources – King John.”, and is one among the many interesting
source posts with quotations from both the source and the play as well.

9. Dainty
Ballerina’s snippet at Shakespeare’s England
entitled “Witches
are hanged, or sometimes burned” quotes from W. Harrison’s A description of England as far as crime
and punishment were treated in 16th-century England.

10. This
week I came across with The
Breadalbane Collection, i.e. a collection of letters written in the 16th
century revealing “Scottish everyday life” in the given period.

2. JSTOR
released for free the Early Journal Content for the sake of data mining, as their
“Early
Journal Content Data Bundle” announces. “The data bundle for EJC includes
full-text OCR and article and title-level metadata.” This should make the
database rather invaluable for those researching the early phase of journal
production.

4. Dan
Cohen’s post,What Will
Happen to Developmental Editing? meditates about the future of editing, insomuch as developmental
editing and peer-review are concerned. I also recommend the comments as well,
coming from publishers. Hopefully, there is going to be either a golden mean
between the two opposing views or a radically different solution. Nevertheless,
Cohen’s position is rather innovative and rather forward-looking.

5. Hugh
Cayless’s post “Scriptio
Continua: TEI in other formats; part the second: Theory” is the second in
the series exploring the uses of TEI. The post presents a difficult case when a
damaged text was amended, and this is signalled with the TEI conventions. Reflecting
on the capabilities of TEI leads to revealing theoretical underpinnings, or
governing principles. One of the statements that I liked the best is this one:
“There is no end of work to be done at this level, of joining theory to
practice, and a great deal of that work involves hacking, experimenting with
code and data.”

Others:

1. Anastasia
Salter’s post, “Breaking
out of Triage Mode” at ProfHacker
is a consoling paper, really. Most of the time, facing big tasks to deal with,
it is just consoling to be reminded that shadow-work can be, should be overcome
to get down to projects: “Small goals,” “Keep projects visible” and “Control your
time-killers.”

2. Lincoln
Mullen wrote an informative post, “Fix
PDFs Quickly with pdftk,” again at ProfHacker,
giving thus help to those who intend to play and work with Pdf documents. The choice
this time is Pdf Toolkit, a command-line application running on Windows, Mac OS
X, Ubuntu Linux etc.

Tuesday, 15 November 2011

Below is a subjective—painfully
incomplete—list of what happened last week in the academic blogosphere. I have
put the individual items of the list into three categories: Early Modern Studies,
Digital Humanities and Others, although I am aware that this
categorization is erroneous, as whatever appears in the Early Modern set, may
also appear in the Digital Humanities as well, since everything that is listed
under Early Modern Studies is related to the digital world, thus with a
generous heart could be related to Digital Humanities as well. For the sake of
helping those who will read this review, still I have distinguished between these categories
with the principle in mind that if a blog-post is related in any ways to EMS,
it will end up in that category, and those DH posts that focus on aspects of DH
and have nothing to do with EMS will be placed in the DH category. The third
category consists of items that belong to neither categories, such as posts or applications that I have come across and found
beneficial.

Early Modern Studies:

Last week
seemed to revolve around Shakespeare, which may be due to the tempest around
the authorship debate. Statistically speaking the next issue is Early Modern
Philosophy focusing on questions of angelology and Newton’s natural philosophy.

3. Holger
Syme: Shakespearean
Mythbusting II: The Fantasy of Astonishing Erudition is the authors
second post in his Shakespearean Mythbusting series, in which the author argues
against the anti-Stratfordian position in the authorship debate triggered by
the release of Anonymous. In this
second post, Holger Syme clarifies the claim that “Shakespeare wasn’t immensely
erudite,” along with arguing for Shakespeare’s linguistic virtuosity, his
knowledge of foreign languages, sources of information.

6. Joad
Raymond’s obituary at Early Modern News Networks is a
moving post about Kevin
Sharpe (1949-2011) who passed away on 5 November 2011. Kevin Sharpe was a
scholar of Early Modern culture focusing on many aspects of Early Modern Studies
with books from a monograph on Sir Robert Cotton (1979), to his
outstanding Reading Revolutions
(2000).

7. At Early Modern Experimental Philosophy
one may read an illuminating post “The Aims of Newton’s Natural Philosophy,” exploring the difference between “what
Newton wants to achieve, and
what he thinks he can
achieve” with reference to the
General Scholium to the Principia (1713).

Digital Humanities:

The DH
posts meditate about reform in higher education, on the importance of social
media in academic blogging, on academic blogging, theory, web searches and historical
research in the digital environment.

4. Natalia
Cecire, who is a postdoctoral fellow at the FoxCenter for Humanistic Inquiry at EmoryUniversity,
showcases an interesting discussion on Twitter triggered by Patrick Murray-John’s
post “Theory,
DH, and Noticing.” This post rightly captures and presents the advantages
of a scholarly discussion disciplined by the 140-character limitation.

5. Tim
Hitchcock in his “Historyonics”
problematizes the discipline of history as is practiced in the digital age via
claiming that historians “have
restricted themselves to asking only the kind of questions books can answer.”

What I found the most interesting cloud-based service last week was
Spideroak, which is similar to Dropbox in a variety of respects.

1. Those who are of losing their documents, and are not friends of Dropbox,
should check out Spideroak. Spideroak is
similar to Dropbox, in many respects, such as offering 2 GB for free, automatic
synchronisation, but for Spideroak one does not have to create a separate
folder as with Dropbox, but clicks on the folders to be stored in the cloud as
well and Spideroak does the rest.

Saturday, 23 April 2011

Shakespeare’s birthday and Liz Woledge’s invitation prompted me to write this post to celebrate the Bard’s (assumed) birthday. Before narrating how Shakespeare shaped my life, I have to clarify two points. First, since I am Hungarian, Shakespeare is not a national hero, a cultural currency to me, but rather an author of works and also an opportunity leading to friendships throughout my life. Second, I am not only taking a glance at this story, as a Shakespeare scholar, but also as a hedonist who seeks and finds much joy in reading or watching his works and also in trying to help other, most of the time younger people find delight there. These two points are the cornerstones of a story, a story of happy and beneficial coincidences.

First, I met Shakespeare, and his oeuvre in the primary school, where I had the privilege to learn English rather early, actually earlier than Russian, the then compulsory language (this is late 1970’s early 1980’s, still the time of the socialist regime). I should have been happy about this privilege, but I was not so much enthusiastic about the English classes for a variety of reasons. At one point, however, I can’t recall which year, to make the classes more interactive, our English teacher gave us the opportunity to talk about what we found interesting about England. I was first rather frustrated about this task, as behind the iron curtain without sources of information about England I could not see anything interesting about England. As the deadline for the presentation was approaching, I felt more and more frustrated, and I could not even trust divine intervention.

Deus ex machina, as in every good story, however, did intervene dressed up in my mother’s passion for spending large sums of money on books. At this time of despair, when browsing the new pile of books, I came across with a three-volume Lexicon of Hungarian Theatre. Enjoying the colour, the odour of the pages, opening here and there I caught sight of the name of Shakespeare. I started reading the short descriptions of the plays, their Hungarian theatrical history, and after a while I realized that this may well be a presentable topic. I filled a complete sketchbook with notes, enjoyed “research” and became somewhat enthusiastic about what I was doing—for the first time during my English studies. As I did not have time to prepare sufficiently, the presentation turned out a very long one, actually it lasted for two forty-five-minute classes. My classmates and the teacher must have been bored to death, but seeing my interest in the topic, all of them were polite enough to listen to me for such a long time.

Then years passed in silence, and my next encounter with Shakespeare took place during my university years through the crooked ways of accidental events. First things first. This was the beginning of the 1990’s, and at that time candidates had to pass a rather difficult entrance exam before they could become students. Having passed this exam I thought I arrived at the peaceful haven of comfortable student-life at the English/ and parallel to this / the Philosophy Departments. This comforting belief was just shattered during the first days, when I realized that there was nobody to tell me which seminar taught by different professors I should take for example for the module “Introduction to English Literature.” I had to rely an rumours and hearsay, and there seemed to lie two paths in front of me: choose the easy way and register for any of the seminars where there was still room left, or try the difficult one and go to a class where there were crowds of students, and having no other way to limit their number, an informal but scary enough entrance exam took place during the first class.

With a friend of mine, we opted for the narrow and painful path, which in the long run proved beneficial. Having passed the entrance exam with the rest of the happy few we were introduced into English literature in a very literal sense, never to leave it again (most of us have become literary critics, academics here and there). The heart and soul of these classes was professor István Géher, one of the best, if not the best, Shakespeare scholars in Hungary, so the introduction was not only to EngLit generally but to Shakespeare as well.

This Géherian introduction to English Literature and to Shakespeare remained a lasting experience and a point of reference throughout my university years. During these years I met other outstanding Shakespeare scholars—Péter Dávidházi, Géza Kállay—who increased my attachment to Shakespeare studies. Fascination about Shakespeare and great professors then led me onto a next stage of my contact with Shakespeare, a PhD programme where I had the opportunity to dive deeper in the Shakespearean oeuvre, slowly opening the world to other Shakespeare scholars, with whom it was pure pleasure to speak about the Bard. Images whirl in my mind about a PhD student conference, where I met Paul Edmondson, another time Stanley Wells, and yet another time Peter Holland, who later on all welcomed me during my scholarly visits to the Shakespeare Institute at Stratford-upon-Avon.

The fact that Shakespeare has remained not only a passing hobby but a professional interest is due to my luck to have received a position at PéterPázmányCatholicUniversity. There I spend most of my teaching-hours with reading, explaining, discussing Shakespeare both at the English Department and at the Comparative Literature Department. These are sources of immense joy to me, and I hope students also find these classes and Shakespeare both beneficial and entertaining at the same time. With Pázmány new aspects of Shakespeare studies opened up through my colleagues: Tibor Fabiny introduced me to the relationship between Shakespeare and the Bible, Péter Tóta Benedek to Christian humanism, Veronika Schandl, Kinga Földváry and Gabriella Reuss to the theory and history of adaptation. And it was also because of my job that I became acquainted with Shakespeare scholars at other institutions in Hungary.

Shakespeare has been from rather early times in my life a source of intellectual joy and—not unrelated to this—scholarly friendships. And what is more enjoyable is that this story is not a complete story, the end is not foreseeable, this year testifying to this. In 2011 I had the honour to participate in the Shakespeare Day on Twitter (#askshakespeare), or this present occasion bringing bloggers together at www.happybirthdayshakespeare.com to celebrate the Bard. What fascinates me about all this is the question concerning the future. The beginning of this story, as I look back, implies that more fun lies ahead. Knowing the piece of wisdom “As a (not completely—Zs.A.) stranger, give it welcome,” happy as I am, I can say with confidence that I’ll follow thee, Will, wherever you lead me. Happy birthday to you!

Monday, 7 February 2011

This post, which is a heavily cut version of the paper I read at HUSSE 10 Conference in Hungary is about a possible link between the parerga in Thomas More’s Utopia and scholarly blogging nowadays, i.e. between these otherwise incommensurable phenomena. A possible link between the two is the then and now new technology of publication, more precisely the shift from manuscript culture to print culture then and from print culture to digital culture nowadays. To establish the link between the two I will utilise in a somewhat rough mode Gérard Genette’s Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation.

The concept of the paratext includes everything that can be found around the text of a work, from the title of the work to the book ending colophon. Out of this wide range of textual and visual elements, I am going to focus on 16 items in Thomas More’s Utopia that include epistles and poems written by various people, woodcuts, and an alphabet. These are the items that have been referred to with the label “parerga” by More scholars since 1931. These elements appeared in the first four authoritative editions of the Utopia.

Genette’s method of defining paratextual elements comes very much in handy for the sake of linking the Morean parerga and blogging. Genette when meditating about paratexts, explores the “paratextual message’s spatial, temporal, substantial, pragmatic, and functional characteristics.” The reason for following this template of analysis is that with this lucid method of identification I can succinctly explore instable character of the parerga, and also the problematics around their communicative situation and indirect functions.

The temporal and spatial instability can be demonstrated by the chart below:

1516, Louvain

1517, Paris

1518 March, Basel

1518 November, Basel

A woodcut of Utopia

The Utopian alphabet

The Tetrastichon

Hexastichon Anemolii

Giles letter to Busleyden

Desmarais’ letter and poem

Geldenhauer’s poem

Schrijver’s poem

Busleyden’s letter to More

More’s letter to Giles

only in the 1516

only in 1517

only in 1518

both in 1516, 17

both in 1516, 18

both in 1517, 18

in every edition

Hexastichon Anemolii

Budé’s letter

Giles’ letter to Busleyden

Desmarais’ letter and poem

More’s letter to Giles

After Utopia

6.More’s second letter to Giles

7.Busleyden’s letter to More

8.Geldenhauer’s poem

9.Schrijver’s poem

10.Errata

11.Gourmont’s device

Erasmus’s letter to Folben

Budé’s letter

Hexastichon Anemolii

woodcut of Utopia (Ambrosius Holbein)

A Utopian alphabet

The Tetrastichon

Giles’ letter to Busleyden

More’s letter to Giles

Woodcut of the interlocutors

After Utopia

9.Busleyden’s letter to More

10.Geldenhauer’s poem

11.Schrijver’s poem

identical with 1518 March, Basel

Three observations follow from the chart.

The columns demonstrate that the first three authoritative editions contained somewhat different elements.

The colours demonstrate that the some items appeared in one of the three, two of the three or in all of the authoritative editions.

There is instability insofar as the location of the material is concerned, as from the 1517 edition there appear items in the postludial position adjacent to the preludial one.

So, all the editions from the 1516 to the 1518 March (November) editions were published with some editorial and authorial consent and yet there are substantial changes from one edition to the other revealing editorial and authorial decisions and indecisions, visions and revisions.

Along with the temporal and spatial instability of the parerga, one also has to account for the pragmatic aspect, i.e. the features that follow from the communicative situation focusing only on the sender(s) and the addressee(s).

As far as the “senders” of the prefatory material are concerned again there is a great variety of possibilities if sticking to the Genetteian classification. In the chart below I have placed some of the senders to identify them.

Authorial

Allographic

Actorial (character from the text)

Authentic

More’s letters (?)

Budé’s letter,

Gilles’ letter (?)

More’s letters

Apocryphal (real person’s name, but was written by someone else)

-

-

-

Fictive

Author of the alphabet, poem in Utopian

More’s, Gilles’ letters (?)

Some of the senders can easily be identified, some, however, can be placed in several slots. Some of the senders are clearly authentic allographic senders, i.e. real people, but other than the author, e.g. Budé in his letter. It is also clear that the author of the Utopian alphabet is a fictive allographic one. Thomas More’s letter to Giles, and Giles to More, however, stick out from this chart. Thomas More’s letters at face value should be authentic authorial, as he is a real person, author of both the text and the letters. Also Giles’s letter should be authentic allographic insomuch as he is real, author of the letter but not identical with the author of the text. At the same time, however, both of them may as well be classified as fictive actorial senders insofar as both of them mention meeting Raphael, which in turn identifies them with characters in the text. This is not the whole story though, as More’s letters may well appear within the authentic actorial category insomuch as the narrative of the text is first person singular.

Parallel to the elusiveness and complexity of the sender(s) of the parerga, the addressees of them also display a dichotomy, especially with respect to the epistles. This dichotomy lies in the interplay between the addressee named in the title of the epistle on the one hand, and the addressee who is the reader of the printed text. These epistles swarm with expressions of inwardness, which is the more interesting if we consider that these letters were not only addressed to the people named as the addressees, but to a general reading public with the intention to read Utopia. So what is going on is putting on display, sharing with a faceless, unknown reading public their real or feigned private affairs, mistakes and friendships. That is we may assume that there is a cunning game being played with the facelessness of the unforeseeable addressee and the addressee of the letter, or more precisely a game with the new technology of printing and the then traditional way of manuscript culture.

The fourth Genettian category, i.e. the function of paratextual elements also reveals much about the parerga. The parerga on the one hand compensates for the loss of context with the appearance of print culture, which was there for the readers of manuscripts. It also functions as a teambuilding exercise for these leading humanists, men of letters and of public affairs. Also the paperga functioned as a marketing device revealing the understanding of the needs of the book as a commodity, and how much it mattered who published the work, and who gave their names to the publication.

After having seen the temporal, spatial and communicative instability of the parerga and their functions, we should move from the humanist scholarly friendship to Digital Humanities, or at least to one of its activities to show how the new technology influences scholarly activity in the 21st century. More precisely I would like to call attention to the technology that is called blogging as something which in a variety of ways resembles the Morean parerga.

Scholarly blogging may be seen as paratext to the published material. It surrounds the publication of a scholarly text insomuch as it may inform the reader about the state of research, about parts, small parts of an ongoing research, ideas that are cast on the margins of the focus of the research, shortened versions of texts published or to be published, about ideas that are interesting but too small to be included in a large project, or snippets, books, ideas that one comes across when in the middle of research.

These blogs can be characterized with instability, flexibility. Blogs similarly to the parerga can be revised after their first publication, can be deleted, can be removed from one blogging platform to the other. The same text may be published at several blogging services with the same type or with another one, i.e. can be published both with traditional macro-blogging (www.blogpost.com) and with meso-blogging services (www.tumblr.com), or at different macro-blogging services, e.g. at www.blogpost.com and at www.wordpress.com.

The communicative situation is also similar to that of the parerga. The sender of the blog can be a real person identified with a name. Some bloggers, however, use nicknames, or rather pennames, and the real person remains hidden, or known to a narrow circle of readers. The addressee, of blogging poses a similar situation to that of early printing. In this case there is the same unknown, unforeseeable audience that was at stake for the authors of the printed medium, i.e. almost anybody may bump into the blog post. Nevertheless, the intended reader is a specialist and the interested reader, and both should find relevant issues for themselves.

Blogging also creates and celebrates communities. On the one hand bloggers inform the intended readers about what they are doing as researchers. They share parts of research projects, thoughts that remain on the margins of these projects, which are worth meditating about. On the other hand, as this technology creates an environment for reflections as comments, there is room for building communities. In this way a blog post is not a finished item in the long run, but may gradually grow with comments, comments on comments and replies to comments. In this respect a post functions as a discussion forum for specialists and for the interested.

Blogging also functions as a means of marketing. Academic bloggers advertise their own published works and blog posts or those of others. Once, say, a blog post is out, or a book, or journal article, a reference to it may soon appear on a micro-blogging platform (www.twitter.com), as well to inform people about it. This reference, i.e. tweet can later be re-tweeted again and again, which fosters instant publicity in so far unimaginable ways.

As a conclusion, one may claim that the comparison of the print in the early 16th century and web 2.0 on an abstract level is fruitful. Back in the 16th-century humanists utilised printing for their own purposes insomuch as creating, sustaining and even boasting off with their scholarly and friendly community. Furthermore they played with its format of its being public with some inwardness. They also discovered the advantages of its power of and for publicity. Similarly to this, blogging is perfect for creating, sustaining and creating social and research networks, and thus contexts for scholarly writing and research. And also the game with publicity and inwardness is there to be played with. Third, blogging is an unexpectedly and unpredictably powerful tool of instant publicity. It is, however, not enough to see the potential in blogging, as the very nature of web 2.0 is that it is in constant evolution. So it is the scholars’ responsibility to take part in its evolution and thus to fashion it into a valuable tool, similarly to their renaissance colleagues, fulfilling the promise anchored in Historia est magistra vitae philosophi.